and returned the girl to her mother."

After which follows the monkish application of the moral, as long as
the entire story: Alexander being made to stand for a good Christian;
the Queen of the North for "a superfluity of the things of life, which
sometimes destroys the spirit, and generally the body"; the Poison
Maid for luxury and gluttony, "which feed men with delicacies that
are poison to the soul"; Aristotle for conscience and reason, which
reprove and oppose any union which would undo the soul; and the
malefactor for the evil man, disobedient unto his God.

There have been at least three writers of English fiction who,
borrowing this germ-plot from the _Gesta Romanorum_, have handled it
with distinction and originality. Nathaniel Hawthorne, having changed
its period and given it an Italian setting, wove about it one of
the finest and most imaginative of his short-stories, _Rappaccini's
Daughter_. Oliver Wendell Holmes, with a freshness and vigor all his
own, developed out of it his fictional biography of _Elsie Venner_.
And so recent a writer as Mr. Richard Garnett, attracted by the subtle
and magic possibilities of the conception, has given us yet another
rendering, restoring to the story its classic setting, in _The
Poison Maid_.[3] Thus, within the space of a hundred years, three
master-craftsmen have found their inspiration in the slender anecdote
which Aristotle, in the opulence of his genius, was content to hurry
into a few sentences and bury beneath the mass of his material.

[Footnote 3: Vide _The Twilight of the Gods and Other Tales_,
published by John Lane, 1903.]